Larry Kramer dedicates a book reflecting on his 40-year medical career “to all those who have walked through my office door.”

An Imperfect Healer (The Gifts of a Medical Life) is a compilation of his musings on being a general practitioner. Notes for the short stories, most previously published in The Medical Post, a nationwide newspaper for physicians, were jotted down over four decades when he could steal a few minutes of quiet time in the otherwise chaotic life of a small town doc.

The stories chronicle “love and loss, tragedy and comedy, and emphatically observe patients who live and die, some with courage and some with fear.”

“Everybody has a story,” said Kramer during a recent interview.

The Brantford resident grew up on a tobacco farm outside Otterville, attended high school in Tillsonburg, and made a decision to study medicine while a student at the University of Western Ontario.

After graduating in 1973, he settled into a medical clinic “across the street from a ballpark” in Simcoe where he would spend the next 27 years.

“In the summer, through a spacious window in my office, I could watch kids playing baseball whenever I tired of the paperwork piling up on my desk,” Kramer writes in his prologue.

He is candid in his description of the joy he took in his practice and the toll the demanding, all-encompassing work took on his mental health and the time it stole from his family.

“For the first 25 years I loved the life,” he writes. “For the last two, hate would be a kind word. I was burnout defined.

“By year 26, the stress, depression and anxiety never really left. Medicine was always on my mind. There was little room for anything else.”

In 2002, Kramer left Simcoe to become a “hospitalist” at Brantford General where his workload changed and, for a time, he found some relief.

“I actually had time to talk to patients, and to think about and research their problems. It was paradise for a while.”

When he left BGH after 10 years, hospital cutbacks, and an older and more ill patient population made him feel he was in much the same position as when he left general practice.

For the last three years of his career, Kramer again found happiness as a part-time locum physician. He says it was like being a grandparent – “all the fun and few of the headaches.”

All the while, Kramer was taking notice of the “wonderful stories my patients had to tell” and he found that writing them down was therapeutic, helping him “cope with both their lives and mine.”

“And they taught me so much: a little bit about medicine, a lot about myself, and a great deal about life in general.

“I learned from everybody. I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone I didn’t enjoy.”

An Imperfect Healer includes chapters about many former patients, largely composites, not drawn from one single person. There are stories about the ghosts of the operating room; about Kramer’s drive to a country home to declare a young wife and mother dead of lung cancer and face her stoic family; the long love story of a couple married more than 70 years facing death with “calm dignity;” middle-of-the-night baby deliveries; the support of colleagues; saying goodbye to the dying; and the loss of a best friend.

There is even a story written by Kramer’s then teenage son reflecting on the stress that wrinkled his father’s face and was revealed in his tired eyes.

Kramer calls his book creative non-fiction drawn from his memories of people whose faces he recalls but whose names are mostly long forgotten. After his retirement about five years ago, he collected and revised the stories, finding a publisher in Nova Scotia-based Pottersfield Press. The book, which will be officially released on Sept. 30, is now available for pre-order.

Kramer said he still misses his medical work – the patients, contact with colleagues and “having that purpose in your life that becomes your identity for so many years.”

The book, he said, is a tribute to those who have enriched his life.

“Oddly, their stories seem to have become my story, so closely have our lives been intertwined. They serve to remind me of who I once was, what I once did, and how I have passed much of my life.”